New death in custody at Shasta County Jail occurred after arrest for public intoxication
Tine Marie Elrite’s death brings the number of people who have died while incarcerated in Shasta to five in less than a year.
Yesterday afternoon, the Shasta County Sheriff’s office announced the in-custody death of a 53-year-old Caucasian woman, Tina Marie Elrite, at the Shasta County Jail. She is the fifth person to die while in county custody since January 2025.
The initial press release said only that Elrite was found unresponsive in her cell around 4:30 a.m. during a routine welfare check, and was later transferred to a hospital after staff attempted to resuscitate her. Elrite was pronounced dead an hour after the discovery. An investigation by the Sheriff’s Major Crime Unit is underway.
In accordance with Assembly Bill 2761, some of the details of Elrite’s death such as well as her age, race, and gender have been listed on county’s website. The site will be updated when her cause of death has been determined by the coroner.
Data analysis by Shasta Scout has shown that the vast majority of people who die while incarcerated at Shasta County’s jail were still awaiting trial. The press release did not indicate what charges Elrite was being held on, but a spokesperson for the Shasta County Sheriff’s office confirmed today that she was arrested for public intoxication, and was awaiting release when she was found unresponsive in a sobering cell. Court records show no recent charges against Elrite. Her last charge was in 2017 related to a family court matter. That case was dismissed.
Why so many deaths in the Shasta County Jail?
In 2025, the Shasta County Grand Jury produced a report on in-custody deaths, which cited the unusually high number of fatalities in the facility when compared to jails in other comparably sized California counties. The report concluded that the jail’s fatalities were caused primarily by the “lifestyle” of incarcerated peoples’ — such as their use of substances — but said the jury could not determine why Shasta’s fatality rate is so much higher than that of other jails.
The report made no mention of Wellpath, the private contractor that provides medical care in Shasta’s jail. As of March of 2025, the recently bankrupt for-profit healthcare company was facing some 1,500 lawsuits nationwide for wrongful deaths. According to its website, Wellpath provides services to over 350 local detention facilities and is responsible for approximately 135,000 clients.
The Grand Jury’s report also failed to address suicide as a risk factor. According to the most recent data, 9 out of 24 in-custody deaths in Shasta since 2020 were reportedly self-inflicted. The Shasta County Sheriff’s policies cites procedures that staff are to undertake to prevent suicides, such as assessing a person’s risk during booking, undergoing suicide prevention training, medical monitoring of individual’s suicide risks, and the placement criteria that ensures at-risk people are held in safety cells.
In California, a pattern of negligence by correctional officers can be legal grounds for a wrongful death lawsuit.
Regarding the county’s legal liability for overdoses, in 2021 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found medical staff in San Diego liable for the methamphetamine overdose of Ronnie Sandoval, whose family was awarded $1.8 million in a wrongful death suit. A similar death occurred in the Shasta County Jail in 2024, when a 60-year-old man died of a methamphetamine-related arrhythmia in a sobering cell.
01.97.26 5:16 pm: We have updated this story to include additional information about the individual who died in custody after receiving a response from the Sheriff’s Office.
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The procedures that correctional deputy sheriffs follow while booking an arrestee into the Shasta County Jail are structured to detect an arrestee with a notable potential for suicide and/or a notable potential for poor-health-caused death. The efficacy of those procedures depends primarily–but not exclusively–on statements made by the arrestee to or in the presence of the arresting officer and answers to questions asked by the correctional deputy as well as the appearance of the arrestee.
This article reports on the grand jury’s report that stated that the primary cause of deaths in the Shasta County Jail during the resent past have been due to the life-styles of the deceased individuals. Anyone who for two or more years has worked in a county jail would be highly likely to agree with that conclusion of grand jury.
I doubt that the Shasta County Coroner–who is the sheriff–does a psychological autopsy on either victims of suicides or victims of natural-causes deaths.
Nevertheless, our Sheriff–Michael Johnson–is a “Grade-A” sheriff who labors diligently to be a “Grade-A+” sheriff. I believe that doing a psychological autopsy on the most recent victim of suicide as well as the woman who died on or about 01/06/2026 (I strongly suspect that she died of natural cause due to poor health) would serve the Office of Sheriff well and could lead to a cross-referencing system or an improved cross-referencing system that could save–at least temporarily–one or more lives per year.
If Sheriff Johnson does those two psychological autopsies and from them finds that there is a better way for him to do his job as jailer, he will publicly state so, and he will do so. (Remember, “A job of decisions is a job of errors,” and we cannot expect other than a low rate of errors when the job is the job of a general-law, law enforcement officer and/or a general county correctional deputy sheriff.)
Robert: Your comment doesn’t explain the disparity between the rates of death in our jail versus those in other parts of the state.
RIP Tina ,may you spread your wings now and land peacefully in the Lord’s hands .
Death Cult, patent.
Why would u say this
RIP TINA MARIE YOU WILL ALWAYS BE REMEMBERED AND NEVER FORGOTTEN!!!